‘Killer Apps’ Will Define Future Smart Watch, But None Looms, Concede Panelists

"I don’t know for sure that everyone’s going to be wearing a watch,” no matter what functionality anyone can build into a wrist-based device, said Kip Fyfe, CEO of 4iii Innovations, which markets wearables for athletes and fitness gurus. “The techs, the geeks, are going to be wanting to wear that. But there’s a whole demographic of folks that just don’t wear watches, and I don’t know how quickly that’s going to change, no matter what you do.”

Andrew Witte, chief technology officer and hardware engineer at smart-watch supplier Pebble Technology, thinks “apps are the killer app” when it comes to catapulting wearables into a huge industry success story, he said. “The beauty of the iPad is you install the mixture of apps that makes sense for you and provides the functionality you need,” he said. “Until very recently, you couldn’t do that with watches. But that’s what we're starting to enable with smart wearables.”

John Huang, engineering project director at Martian Watches, said he’s “in sync” with others who predict that killer apps ultimately will determine whether smart watches flourish or languish. “But to be honest, I think to this point right now, there’s no such candidate just now.” Huang is optimistic “we'll get that,” he said. “We're looking for that, something like that. And with all the hype out there, with the developers trying out stuff, I think we will see that in the near future.”

One ultimate aim of smart watches and other wearables will be to “free people from feeling tied down to their phones in terms of notifications,” said Witte. “It feels a little bit counterintuitive, maybe, that a device that’s so intimately attached to you and gets your attention so easily by vibrating or putting something on its screen could help you feel not quite so tethered to the Internet and social networking and so forth. But because it’s so easy to notice when it is trying to get your attention, you don’t have to constantly look at it the way you're constantly checking a phone. It gives you confidence that when you do need to get notified, it’s going to get your attention.”

Battery life remains a high hurdle impeding consumer adoption of smart watches, Witte said. “Dumb wearables -- wristwatches that only tell the time -- historically, you're talking about battery life in years, maybe even energy harvesting as such that you never have to worry about the battery,” he said. “Ideally, people are looking to have that same battery life of years even as smart watches gain more functionality. So one of the things we're looking to improve is battery life. That’s what consumers are asking for. But at the same time, making that especially difficult is we need to have the display always on, because if we're trying to optimize a device for interactions that last 10 seconds or less, if it takes you a few seconds just to find the switch to turn the display on, you've already made that interaction very inefficient. Likewise, it needs to be viewable in any condition. If you need to find shade to interact with your device when you're outdoors, especially when a lot of the applications are fitness-oriented, that can be very difficult.”

Huang of Martian Watches agreed that battery life for “smart wearables” is a “very tough” challenge. “We have a small, small form factor” to accommodate battery solutions for devices that must always be on, Huang said. For now, Martian Watches’ approach is to maintain an analog clock display on the smart watch that’s always on, even when the device runs “out of juice,” he said.